for approval by the IESG as an Informational RFC. Approval of this RFC will
allow IANA to register the media types, text/xml and application/xml for use
in labeling the transport of Extensible Markup Language (XML) content on the
Internet.

The document's abstract reads:

This document proposes two new media subtypes, text/xml and
application/xml, for use in exchanging network entities which are
conforming Extensible Markup Language (XML). XML entities are
currently exchanged via the HyperText Transfer Protocol on the World
Wide Web, are an integral part of the WebDAV protocol for remote web
authoring, and are expected to have utility in many domains.

This document has received substantial review from the World Wide Web
Consortium's XML Special Interest Group mailing list, and has received
additional valuable feedback from the IETF-Types mailing list.

Since XML can be encoded in the UTF-16 charset, which uses multiple octets
per character, the registration of XML did not fit neatly within the
existing MIME framework of top-level types. This document represents a
series of tradeoffs between the desire to use the text type for XML, and the
deficiencies of text for multi-octet charsets. The authors believe a much
cleaner registration of XML would be possible if a new top-level media type
existed which cleanly supported textual content in multi-octet charsets.

However, given the broad desire to begin sending XML across the Internet
today, a need exists to perform the best possible media type registration of
XML given the current media types framework. Even if a new top-level media
type for internationalized textual data were to be created in the near
future, the media type registrations in draft-whitehead-mime-xml-04 would be
useful in the transition period as MIME processors are updated to use the
new top level type.